Los Angeles Roadster Show

June 17, 18 2017

Pomona CA

This trip was originally planned as an adventure in our '38 Ford pickup. Between snow in the Siskiyous on the 11th and as much as 113 degrees the rest of the trip, at least 6 different one hour or longer stoppages on the California freeways, not to mention no A/C and the necessity to "drive" the old girl at 80 mph, we were pretty glad we opted for the Subaru instead.

Our goal was to do the LA Roadster Show in Pomona over the Father's Day weekend. We attended the show in 2012 and had so much fun we thought we'd do it again. In 2012 the show was estimated at over 2,000 cars and covered every part of the Fairplex grounds except the drag strip.

If you're familiar with that venue you can imagine our surprise to arrive at 7:10 Saturday morning and pull directly into the first row behind the handicap cars. That doesn't happen down there...ever. We walked over to the ticket booths and they weren't manned! No volunteers to take our $20 each. There must have been 200 spectators walk through that we saw.

Once on site, there was a smattering of roadsters but no wall to wall assemblage around the four expo buildings. Shoot, three of them were closed up too. We walked out past the horse racing track among a few venders to "the other parking lot" where the non-roadsters park and there were maybe 200 cars out in that area and very few additional cars coming in.

Over to the massive swap meet area and it was the same story. Maybe a third of the spaces were occupied. What if you gave a car show and nobody came?

If this had been GoodGuys at Puyallup you'd say attendance was down some from previous years. It's hard to estimate because cars are strung over several hundred acres.

So why? I asked an LA Roadster member. He said it was because of the triple digit forecast. Others, like a vendor and a couple of exhibitors I spoke with claimed it was greed on the part of the promoters. In the past, if you entered the show you got a small pewter trophy of a high boy, a pewter mug and a free steak dinner all for the price of gasoline to get your car there. Last year they supposedly gave out 8500 mugs! This year there were 500 mugs to the first 500 preregistered and it cost $50. Vendor fees skyrocketed and stalls in the swap meet were apparently being hoarded for some obscure reason.

I can see how the costs for a show like this would be horrific. Just renting the Fairplex must cost something in the five digit range. And 2000 trophies and mugs and several thousand dinners can't be cheap.

But, yes, we were disappointed at the scope of the show. Still had a good time but I won't make that 2700 mile trip again just to go to that show.

But, hey, the pool was great. The margarita's were icy. We won't be moving to Palm Springs anytime soon. The tacos at La Paloma on Foothill Blvd were perfect and wifey and I had some quality time together after what has been a hectic several months. Sure can't complain about that.